Best Practices in Software Engineering in 2024

Many experts in software engineering wonder if there is an ideal code and conditions for its creation? The IT industry is built on pretty strict rules and specific software development techniques. Each company chooses its development method and pace. There are strict rules and various best practices in software development, such as scrum or extreme programming.

However, no matter how hard you try, it is not always possible to follow the chosen strategy clearly, even if you have very established processes and specialists are carefully selected.

Statista says that in 2024, 21 percent of respondents state that they have added source code management to their DevOps practice to release code faster. Other vital processes to release code faster are continuous integration and continuous delivery.

It suggests that companies are striving to apply development methods that allow them to meet deadlines. However, is it always possible to remember about flexibility?

Within this flexibility, we need to think about the general structures that make a project successful and how consistency and consistency can improve your chances of achieving the “ideal.”

This article will discuss the best software engineering practices that allow the team to create the final product without the hassle.

Why are new practices in software development relevant?

The IT community often strives to create standardized coding conventions. It helps to keep the code up-to-date and valuable for clients, future developers, and coders themselves. Any professional programmer will tell you that he spends most of his time reading code, not writing it. There is a good chance that you will work on existing code more often than writing something from scratch. Therefore, your code must be easy for other engineers to understand.

Best Practices in Software Engineering

1. Writing readable code

The primary rule here is always to write code that is easy for others to understand. Writing highly optimized math routines or building complex libraries is relatively easy. Writing 200 lines of code that another software engineer can immediately understand is more challenging.

Forbes writes that this task is easier to handle if you assume that another lousy developer you never meet will inherit the code and maintain it.
At first, it seems like a burden and unnecessary work, but later, when you come back for a code update, it will make life much more accessible, even for you.

2. Always Refactor Your Code

Refactoring is about improving the structure of your code without changing its actual functionality. When you have multiple pieces of code that do similar things, you can convert them into a single function. This action simplifies your overall code. However, when you want to change how this feature works, you (or any other engineer) only need to update one feature, not several.

To create a quality program, it is imperative to take the time to refactor your code. Ultimately, refactoring will speed up development time and make the software development process smoother.

3. Make sure your code works as expected

First, good code should work well and perform its functions correctly. In the world of software development, writing code quickly and accurately is pointless if the end product is slow and unstable. It is especially true for large and complex programs.

It is also essential to minimize the amount of memory your code takes up. From a performance standpoint, working with many functions on large amounts of data can drastically reduce the efficiency of your code.

4. Control your code versions

Code version control is usually understood as a software development environment that tracks all changes and synchronizes them with the main file stored on a remote server. When you have a code version control system, you get productive code.

Code version control has its advantages:

• protection against system failures thanks to storage on the server
• code available for all team members
• independent parallel development and revisions
• the ability to return to the previous version if there are severe errors in the current one

5. Always test your code

It is impossible to follow development quality standards without testing practice. Testing ensures that the code gives the desired result and meets all the user requirements. Unit tests are used to test small, self-contained pieces of logic in your code. These tests are designed to cover all possible conditions.

The process of writing a test itself is beneficial. It requires you first to figure out the behavior of the code you write and how you intend to test it.
Small and regular tests are better than one big test after completion. This approach helps maintain a modular structure and results in a higher quality end product.

6. Develop your professional coding style

A professional approach to coding is a way of thinking. This thinking only develops with experience and time. Experienced programmers don’t release unstructured blocks of code to get it done quickly. Instead, their code is almost always understandable to other engineers, no matter how long it takes to write it.

Rely on a number of principles to develop this approach:

• use descriptive names for functions and variables
• avoid over-pressing
• hence, whether your code is generic (across all programming and markup languages) or production quality (for a specific language), it should always follow an excellent coding convention

7. Reviews code

Everyone makes mistakes, and that’s okay. Feel free to share your code with some of your colleagues. Having a colleague read your pull requests before the merge is a good way to ensure the final quality of your code. Code review can help reduce bugs in a product – that’s the bottom line – so give up on the idea of ​​perfection.

8. Conduct an estimation of writing the code

A realistic budget will keep your software project from being overwhelmed. Agile methods make it easy to change the scope of work as the project progresses, but misjudging can cause problems with quality, morale, and results. Evaluating can be pretty challenging as it is challenging to strike the right balance between realism and sand-mixing when there are so many unknowns. But this comes with experience.

Conclusion

In reality, there may never be a “perfect software development project”! However, you can strive for it. It can be your real goal. Some points come intuitively; some require discipline and experience. In any case, the end justifies the means. The tips in this article can serve as starting points for your best programming strategy. And if you need additional advice, you can always contact specialists such as MLSDev – software development company and get a high-quality overview of your methods of writing and interacting with code.